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I had just that conversation with one of the founders of Cuil. Anyone remember Cuil? Search engine company, 2008-2010. They actually got it running, but not very well. I asked what the revenue model was. They didn't have a good answer. They ran out of runway before finding more investors or revenue.

Cuil was a nice demo, though. With under 100 people, they got a search engine going that did its own crawls and was roughly comparable to early Google. But this was before Google started to really suck, and there wasn't a market.

Google hired their key people to keep them off the market.

> You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.

I was very confused by this response, but searching Google for this text returns the following page on "Cuil Theory"

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory

Never having come across it before, I thank you. That made my day. Or didn't. Or something. All I know is I am not having a hamburger for lunch.

Holy shit. I had completely forgotten about that until just now. Reading your comment, I was struck by the most intense déjà vu. Took me a few seconds to place it.

3‽, might as well start looking up those old rage comics.

Is your point here that cuil should not have been started because they failed to answer your question about revenue model?

Well, lack of a revenue model killed them.

There was more pressure back then to build a profitable business. Today there are companies growing by funding round after funding round without reaching profitability.

I think the point is

"If you cannot espouse the benefits and possible market of the product you yourself are building - why are you building it?"

Basically - be your own advocate. If you can't handle someone asking about your product (even in a negative fashion) how the hell can you hope to have the conviction and drive to actually sell it?

You don't need to "convince" every critic - but you sure as hell need to be able to step into the ring and talk to their points.

This is the same reason debate teams often explicitly spend time reviewing the problem from their opponents perspective - you must be able to understand and counter arguments from your detractors.

This article makes me very curious about what the author considers an existential question. I don't disagree with the content of the article, but the title is throwing me. None of the examples he gave of unproductive things to say are questions at all, and I would consider one of his recommended questions (What is the competition missing that you think you got?) to be pretty close to an existential question for a startup.

I took it to mean any question that, if you don't have a good answer, means your startup shouldn't exist. Like if the answer to "why would someone use you instead of Google" is null, then you are probably not going to successfully compete with Google. Or, you could come up with the best tool that ever existed for converting WEBP images to PCX, and if you don't have an answer for "who on earth has used the PCX format in the past thirty years" then you're probably not gonna sell many copies of that tool.

The OP is 'begging the question', by not explicitly stating the purpose of such conversations, and the fundamental reasons for avoiding these questions. Here is the critical paragraph:

>"It is almost certain that if someone is smart enough to build a search engine while living off of ramen, they also know more about what Google is capable of. Your attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone. If anything, you’re totally denying the fundamental aspect of innovation and entrepreneurs throughout history who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new."

Notice how the author says: "[y]our attempt to question them is not helpful to anyone". They also say imply that non-technical conversations about start-ups are basically useless: "[t]here is already enough knowledge about startups".

> who have established that one or ten person team can conquer many a Goliaths, or bring to the world something entirely new.

I wonder how many of those teams couldn't answer what was better about their product than the one they were replacing? I'll bet Google themselves could have answered that question, comparing themselves to Yahoo, back in the day.

I think the key part is less that and more the way of phrasing it. So you're encouraged to ask non-technical questions how they're supposed to be better than the competition but not allowed to say "but Google dominates that space, doesn't it?" to imply they don't necessarily need to exist. (though the author also says "I think your UI is not good" is 'constructive' feedback, so they don't think you have to be nice!)

I think there's a point to that especially if it's a business you don't know and you're not a VC or angel, but I also think there's a surprisingly large number of entrepreneurs out there who are smart enough to live off ramen and program something complex like a search engine who do have a massive blind spot about routes to market or the complexity required for the software to actually be viable rather than just minimum. Sometimes the blunt approach "doesn't the network effect of $dominantplayer create a massive lockin" is more helpful than a general "so how are you going to get customers?" which is easy to answer with a generic "sales/marketing/referrals/affiliates". The entrepreneur ought to be able to give a more interesting answer to the first question, and if they aren't able to they're going to need to figure it out...

It's more the point that sometimes you don't want to have to justify yourself to all and sundry, especially when the person you're talking to has no real insight and wants to appear smart. I've been to loads of events where you just want to have a nice chat and before you know it you're getting a lecture on all the ways in which you're going to fail. One time, I didn't even want to talk about my stuff but was basically forced to have to justify myself.

Do this a few times and it gets exhausting. It's got nothing to do with whether you can answer the questions, and everything to do with the fact that sometimes you just don't want to answer the questions.

"Yeah, that's the kind of thing I spend all day working on, but right now I just want to hang out with you guys and have dinner / play this game / enjoy the party / whatever."

But the article's author would probably regard "why would someone use your engine over Google" as a reasonably good question, as opposed to "nobody is going to use your engine over Google because it's a household verb".

It's not the same as the author's example "what makes you believe you can do better than Google" because that question assumes you are doing exactly the same thing as Google: that all the prospective users of the idea are fully satisfied with Google, and have to be convinced to use something else for no reason at all. Your "why would someone use your search engine over Google" is better; it's more closely in line with "how will you get your first users".

> "why would someone use your engine over Google" as a reasonably good question, as opposed to "nobody is going to use your engine over Google because it's a household verb".

Well, one of these is a question, the other is a statement... Actually I noticed that if you look at his examples of what not to say, none of them are questions. So maybe a better idea is "don't say discouraging things to your founder friends, ask them questions instead."

Those statements are not grammatically questions, but they are questioning statements. You can easily turn them into rhetorical questions:

"LOL, do you really think someone is going to use your search engine over Google?"

GP picked that example because the article explicitly calls it a bad question. The third paragraph of the article:

>Let’s say your friend is obsessed with building a new search-engine. When you ask them why do they believe they can do better than Google, you are literally telling them that they shouldn’t be doing this since if it was ‘correct’ or possible or profitable, then Google would have already done that. This is bad.

It's not the same at all, because that question insinuates that Google is already doing everything close to as best as possible.

Whereas users who use Google may have reasons to use an alternative engine even if it isn't strictly better than Google in every regard.

Probing into who those users might be and what their needs are envisioned to be is more constructive than "can you do better than Google"?

The answer is somewhere in the middle. If you aren’t the end user, asking them these questions doesn’t help. Simply because you aren’t the end user.

You thinking that you know what the end user wants is the same as the founder not talking to end users. In that case, you aren’t helping one bit.

It is the same as a bunch of founders sitting around judging each other’s product. How does that help?

These questions need to be asked by the end user. They are the people ultimately using the product. Only they can say whether it is something they want to use.

I don't know if I agree with you. The point of the article is that those questions are not only unhelpful, they're distracting, and you shouldn't be trying to distract a founder. The reason why people are asking those questions is because they themselves are nervous and they're projecting their nerves onto you.

Just frame it as the author recommends: "How will you get your first billion users?"

This comment is correct.